The Steel Bonnets

The Grahams were admittedly a special case. Scottish in origin, English by adoption, and ready to be either, they were settled within the limit of the English West March. The biggest family in the Western Border, they also had a fair claim to being the worst. In murder, blackmail, theft, extortion, and intrigue they were second to none—yet they held their English land on condition that they defend the Border against the Scots, watching the fords and being constantly “with gere and horses still reddye” to resist incursions. How well they did it was seen in the Kinmont raid when they actually assisted Buccleuch’s foray to Carlisle Castle, having done much of the plotting groundwork as well.

“Many of them are linckede in marriage [with the Scots], and partakers with them, and some bringers in of the same.” It was the understatement of the century, but manfully as Scrope tried to prove the Graham’s treachery (which everyone knew, anyway), he was never able to do anything effective about them.

And of course with the passage of time the general situation became worse, with the international family ties growing ever stronger and more complex, until it must have seemed to harassed officials like Scrope that everyone in his March had relatives over the Border, and was therefore involved in their tangled and ever-changing feuds and alliances. It became increasingly hard to determine who precisely was who, much less who could be trusted.

But if intermarriage was a dangerous nuisance, thickening the plots of regular criminal conspiracy, it was no more alarming to the English Wardens than Scottish immigration. Illegal pasturing of cattle, and even raising of crops, in the opposite realm, was one thing, but the permanent settlement of thousands of Scots on the English side of the line was a threat to national security. Hunsdon in 1587 found “so many Scottes planted within Northumberland, especially on the very Borders, as no exploit or purpose can be secretly resolved uppon, but … the Scottes have straight warning.” In some English towns there were more Scots than English; given authority, Hunsdon would get rid of two or three thousand of them.

This invasion was partly blamed on the fact that the English tenants had been driven out by Scottish raiders; it would have been fair to share the responsibility with oppressive English landlords. And it does not appear as though the ordinary English Marchman shared his superiors’ concern at the presence of the incomers; large numbers of Scots found employment as servants on the English side.

Not all of them were so welcome. The English West March found itself “for Scottes roges … overlaide with thousands”, and even in the largest English towns their presence constituted an insoluble problem. The Mayor of Berwick was complaining in 1592 of Scottish gentlemen banished from their own country for murder, who went armed about the city’s streets; no Scots-born person, he thought, should be permitted there, in particular those Scottish merchants who provided embarrassing competition to local traders, and carried English money into Scotland.2 But in spite of his complaint, there were still three or four hundred Scots in Berwick four years later (over 10% of the population), although those men of the garrison with Scottish wives had been dismissed, and all Scottish servants banished. Those who remained were “too many for safety”, in John Carey’s opinion—“Marye! the country is full of Scottes!”

Berwick, although it had provided a special Scottish market place outside the fortifications in 1587 (after all, it depended on Scottish food) and prohibited Scots from lodging in the town “or to walk up and down”, was less successful with its unwanted immigrants than Carlisle. “Scotch merchants” were avoiding tolls there in 1596, but as the largest city on the Borders, inured to guarding the worst stretch of the frontier, it seems to have been more tolerant of those from north of the line. Most of its guilds had regulations discriminating against Scots, and the city itself forbade “unchartered” Scots to live there, or to walk the streets after curfew without an English companion. However, it also distinguished between “outmen” (those having business in the city but living outside) and “foroners” (complete strangers), so the Scots were not alone in being specially classified.3

Enforcing the discriminatory rules in the cities, and resisting the mass immigration which Hunsdon deplored in the Middle March, depended on being able to tell who was Scottish and who English. This was not always easy. Names were not a reliable indication, since many Border families were represented on both sides of the line, and adopted nationality accordingly. Although the Armstrongs were predominantly Scots, there were plenty of English Armstrongs who had lived in Cumberland from time immemorial, and who felt no kinship whatever for their Liddesdale namesakes. The muster roll of Askerton in England in 1580–81 contains fourteen Armstrongs out of a total of forty-nine names. The Grahams have already been mentioned as the classic example of a divided family; the Nixons and Crosers, important names of Liddesdale, were also as much English as Scottish; the Forsters, Halls, Bells, Littles and many others were to be found on both sides (see Chapter VII).

This was not just a case of small groups having left the parent clan and drifted across the Border; it may have been quite the reverse. Many of the leading Scottish families were in fact English in origin—the Maxwells, Armstrongs, Carlisles, and possibly the Johnstones, among others.

One can pity the innocent “non-Borderer” Wardens, or the unfortunate Frenchman who once held the Scottish East March, when confronted with this kind of mixture. An Armstrong might be an Englishman of unimpeachable standing—but he might well have Scottish relatives, and anyway before he could be safely pigeon-holed it would be necessary to find out if he was at feud with anyone, or to whom he was paying blackmail, or what professional alliances he might have. In the absence of computers, an “outsider” Warden could only call on God.

Birthplace and antecedents, when they could be established, provided a guide to a man’s nationality, but were not infallible. A heated dispute broke out between James VI of Scotland and young Scrope over one Robert Graham, whom the king claimed as “a Scottisman, borne, bapteist, mariit and bruiking (holding) land in Scotland”—powerful qualifications. Possibly so, said Scrope, but he could prove otherwise; for one thing, he had Graham’s admission that he was English. This, of course, was usually the decisive argument in doubtful cases: a man had to be accepted as what he said he was. Enterprising Borderers made the most of this; in 1550 Sandye Armstrong, ostensibly English and living in the Debateable Land, drove Lord Dacre to involved correspondence with London by threatening to become Scottish if the English Warden did not give him proper protection from his enemies.

These nationality cases baffled officialdom, who had no means of settling them. When Sir John Maxwell, Warden of the Scottish West March, laid before the Scottish Privy Council in 1564 a proposal that he should “admit George and Arthur Graham as Scottismen”, the council played a master-stroke. “Efter the mater wes resonit, and all motives and perswasionis were considerit”, Maxwell was told to use his own discretion.

In practice, there probably was one good test that could be applied to a Borderer whose nationality was in dispute, and whose antecedents were unknown: his accent. Even today, dialect has a habit of stopping dead at the Border line; to the native there is all the difference in the world between the harsh, resonant growl of the Cumbrian, the extraordinary guttural Northumbrian voice which makes “r” a drawn-out clearing of the throat, and the up-and-down cadences of the Scottish side. I suspect that on the Eastern Border a dialect expert would find that the accents have come closer together than they have in the West, where the social and cultural barrier between Scotland and England is today as solid as a wall, but in general the difference is strong and unmistakable. Too strong, at any rate, for any local person to confuse a Scots voice with an English one.

Yet there is a widely-held theory that in the sixteenth century there was a common Border accent, and that it was hard to tell Scotch from English. Possibly this belief has arisen because the vocabularies of the two sides are and were very close; the North-country Englishman says “ken” for “know”, and “ower” for “over”, and “cuddy” for “ass”, just as the Scot does. But the pronunciations are quite different, although this may not be so evident to the outsider’s ear.

The common-accent school cite as evidence the passage from a seventeenth-century London play in which a Northumbrian is mistaken for a Scot. “I was born in Redesdale,” he says, “and come of a wight riding sirname, called the Robsons; gude honest men, and true, saving a little shiftynge for theyr living; God help them, silly poor men.”

A woman answers: “Me thinke thou art a Scot by they tongue,” and the Robson denies it hotly.

This does not demonstrate anything satisfactorily except that a Londoner had difficulty in telling the difference; one is inclined to prefer the contemporary evidence of the letters in which Borderers, with their eccentric spellings, set their accents on paper. Take the Laird Johnstone, a Scot, writing in 1597:

“I resavit your lordschipis lettre this Vodinsday at four efter nowne,” he begins, and later continues “… and siclyk hes resavit ane lettre fra Thomis Senws (Senhouse?) desyring me to be in Cairlell this Vodinsday at iij, the quihilk lettre I gat nocht quhill fywe houris efter none.”

Now there, as clear as a bell across four centuries, is a Border Scot writing as he talks, with a broad Scottish accent. Could anyone believe that Johnstone spoke with the same accent as a Northumbrian like John Forster, who can be heard muttering gruffly as he writes to Walsingham:4

“For we that inhabit Northumberland are not acquaynted with any lerned and rare frazes, but sure I am I have uttered my mynde truly and playnely … where as I am wonderfully charged with aboundance of catell fedinge and bredinge uppon the Borders, as is aledged—I assure your honour I never solde non.”

The Northern English voice is unmistakeable—the last four words alone will clinch the matter for anyone who knows the Border voices.5 Both letters fit precisely into modern Scots and Northumbrian speech, so it seems reasonable to assume that the modern difference in accents is no greater than it was four hundred years ago.

However, even if the outsider Wardens did learn eventually to tell Scot from English by listening to them, they can never have recovered entirely from the shock of discovering just how deep and strong were the links and ties of culture, marriage, outlook, and behaviour between the supposedly opposite sides. Perhaps there are lessons in race relations on the old Border which might be studied with profit by modern sociologists. It was all there—race discrimination, victimisation by law, illegal immigration, and inter-racial marriage—and Border experience seems to suggest that whatever laws may be passed about segregation and integration are fairly irrelevant unless the people closely involved want to go along with them.

1. Eure thought it politic “to draw some of the headsmen from friendship with the Scots” in 1597. He was particularly anxious about the Fenwicks, Erringtons, and Robsons.

2. This may have been a well-founded complaint, in spite of the debasement of English coinage throughout the century. It is worth noting that in 1543 the Scottish Privy Council had forbidden the import of the English groat, because they “ar nocht silver and are false”.

3. The Smiths’ Guild of Carlisle went even further, specifically discriminating against “Francis forringers”. Anyone speaking a foreign tongue was, to Carlisle, simply a Frenchman.

4. Sir Francis Walsingham (1530–90), secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth from 1573 to his death, and famous as chief of intelligence and counterespionage.

5. One wonders if Shakespeare knew the Northumbrian accent—he could capture regional voices expertly, as he did in Henry V with Fluellen the Welshman and Jamy the Scot. Hotspur’s lines in Henry IV, Part 1, go beautifully in Northumbrian, especially his “I remember when the fight was done” speech; it is remarkable just how many words and phrases designed to emphasise the Northumbrian vocal peculiarities are contained in this passage—“perfumed like a milliner”, “guns and drums and wounds”, “untaught knaves, unmannerly”, and so on. The same is true for the whole of Hotspur’s part; it is hard to believe that this was accidental. (There is, of course, a tradition that Hotspur had a speech impediment, and that Shakespeare knew this. But as one gentleman living in the Coquet Valley has suggested, this apparent impediment may have been no more than an ordinary Northumbrian accent).

IX

Bangtail and company

The Borderers were unusual in so many things that it is not surprising to find that they had their own peculiar customs in the matter of forenames and nick-names, which fell into several categories.

The first, and most confusing of these, arose from the frequency with which men of the same clan and surname also bore the same Christian name—one index to the Calendar of Border Papers, for example, contains no fewer than twelve Hob Elliots, and there is an abundance of Jock Armstrongs, Walter Scotts, Richard Grahams, Andrew Forsters, and so on. It was necessary to distinguish them, and one method was to combine their Christian name with that of their father: thus Christie Armstrong the son of William Armstrong was Will’s Christie, while Christie Armstrong the son of Simon Armstrong was Sim’s Christie. This was sometimes carried on to a third generation, so that there were Gibb’s Geordie’s Francis, Dick’s Davie’s Davie, and Patie’s Geordie’s Johnnie. Occasionally the mother was cited, as in Bessie’s Andrew and Peggie’s Wattie.

A second method was to call a man by his place or land: Kinmont Willie, Lancie Whithaugh, Hob of the Leys, Jock of the Side, Jock of the Park, etc., or by his rank—Sim the Laird, for example. By a combination of the two methods we get Whithaugh’s Andy, the Laird’s Jock, Kinmont’s Jock, Hob the clerk’s brother, and the like.

All too often contemporary documents dispensed with surnames altogether, and since Armstrongs called the Laird’s Jock or Rynion’s Archie had a habit of cropping up generation after generation, the task of sorting them out becomes complicated. This happens well up the social scale, too, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the various Kerr family leaders, since they are almost invariably referred to not by their given names, but by their estates. One Cessford can look very like another, and the same is true of the great breed of Ferniehurst.

But the most interesting nick-names, and the ones in which the Borderers obviously took great pleasure, were those descriptive and often highly offensive appellations referring to personal appearance, habits, and behaviour. Thus we find Curst Eckie, Ill Will Armstrong, Fingerless Will Nixon, Nebless Clem Croser, the two Elliot brothers, Archie and George, who were familarly known as “Dog pyntle” and “Buggerback”, and an Armstrong called “Skinabake”. Names like these last three probably owe themselves to nothing more than the Borderers’ delight in thinking up irrelevant and poetic obscenities to attach to each other; Border children still bandy them about with disarming fluency.

On the other hand, one can guess how David Armstrong came to be known as “Bangtail”. Exploits of a sterner kind are commemorated in names like Ill-drowned Geordie, Archie Fire-the-Braes, Out-with-the-sword, Gav-yt-hem, Crack-spear, and Cleave-the-crune. These explain themselves, but one wonders how a reiver came to be known as Laird-give-me-little, or As-it-luiks, or Hen-harrow, or why the nickname Sweet-milk was so popular.1

Robert Bruce Armstrong, the Liddesdale historian, had a fine collection of these names, many of them given above, and one cannot do better than this representative selection:

Hob the king, Dand the man, Gib alangsyde, Hob-wait-about-him, Red Cloak, Unhappy Anthone, Sow-tail, Ower-the-moss, Lang Will, Red Rowan, Wantoun Sim, David-no-gude-priest, Evilwillit Sandie, Shag, Bull, Lamb, Mouse, Sore John and Wynking Will.

If we knew how they came to be awarded we would know more of the Borders than we can ever discover from conventional histories.

1. There is a striking resemblance between some of these names and those of Red Indians like Alligator-Stands-Up, Thunder-Rolling-over-the-Mountain, and Crazy Horse. Many of these meant the opposite of what they appeared to mean—e.g. Man-Afraid-of-his-Horses, far from being a term of contempt, meant literally a man so formidable that even the sound of his horses terrified his enemies. Probably some of the Border names above have the same kind of hidden meaning.

X

The game and the song

Like so many warlike people, the Borderers were sports enthusiasts, and still are. The little Scottish towns, with their small catchment areas, produce Rugby teams that compare with the biggest club sides anywhere; within living memory the wrestlers of Cumberland, farm boys and Saturday afternoon amateurs, could send out a team to meet the best in the world and beat them.

There was no Rugby in the sixteenth century, but there was “football”, the father of Rugby, Soccer, and the American game. In its primitive form it lingers today in places like Jedburgh and Workington, where most of the young male population is supposed to take part, and the playing area covers the whole town. The old Borderers loved their football, and on the Scottish side even the nobility joined in, despite the laws against “futbawis, gouff, or uthir sic unprofitable sportis”. Mary Queen of Scots once watched a two-hour match on the meadow beneath Carlisle Castle, and Francis, Earl Bothwell, the notorious “King Devil”, played the game on the Esk with other “declairit traitours to his Majesty” in 1592. He occasionally played dirty too, if we can accept Robert Bowes’ account of an earlier match in which “some quarrel happened betwixt Bothwell and the Master of Marishal upon a stroke given at football on Bothwell’s leg by the Master, after that the Master had received a sore fall by Bothwell.” Every football fan will recognise this sequence of events; obviously some things about the game have not changed. Following the incident Bothwell and the Master agreed to meet secretly next day to fight the matter out, and the king had to intervene.

Football incidents were not always so trivial, however. One match, the fore-runner of the Scotland v. England internationals, perhaps, resulted in slaughter. It happened in 1599, when six Armstrongs came to Bewcastle to play a match against six of the local English boys, and after the game there was “drynkyng hard at Bewcastle house”. However, it happened that a Mr William Ridley, an Englishman, “knowing the continual haunt and receipt the great thieves and arch murderers of Scotland, had with the captain of Bewcastle”, determined to capture the Armstrong footballers while they were on English ground. No sportsman, he assembled his friends and lay in wait, but somehow the Armstrongs had been tipped off, and Mr Ridley’s ambush party found themselves suddenly set on by more than 200 riders. Ridley and two of his friends were killed, thirty taken prisoner, “and many sore hurt, expecially John Whytfeild whose bowells came out, but are sowed up againe”.

The result of the game is not recorded.

Even more popular was horse-racing, in which the Borderers excelled, especially in the West Marches. The prizes were usually bells, and the oldest, dating from the 1590s, is in Tullie House Museum, Carlisle. Like the football matches, race meetings were frowned on by the authorities because they attracted the dregs of society, and were commonly used as covers by plotters: the rescue of Kinmont Willie was planned, in its later stages, at a Scottish race meeting, and the murder of Sir John Carmichael, a Scottish Warden, by Armstrongs, was plotted at a football match.

However, Wardens and officers sometimes attended the races. Young Buccleuch was a race addict, Lord Willoughby1 entered horses at Scottish meetings and won a bell, and young Scrope, who was a compulsive gambler, attended at least one meet where he conducted secret political business. The meetings appear to have been quietly run, considering the times, but there were occasional outbursts of violence, and at one meeting where a Graham and an Irvine quarrelled, the Irvine’s horse was killed.

Racehorses were greatly prized, and although horse-trading between the realms was forbidden from time to time, leading Borderers as well as lesser men were willing to wink at the law where a good mount was concerned. It was not unknown even for a Warden officer to enter a horse for a race so that a prominent reiver from the other country might judge it with a view to buying—and this a reiver whom the officer had arrested in dramatic circumstances not long before (see p. 120, note 5).

Hawking, hunting and fishing were of course popular sports, and occasionally provided the excuse for Anglo-Scottish fraternisation, although one celebrated hunting resulted in bloodshed, and almost full-scale battle. Farther down the sporting scale cock-fighting was popular, and still takes place in Cumberland: during the war I saw a main organised by Border Regiment soldiers in Burma, and only a few years ago a Cumberland farmer ran for Parliament on a platform to legalise cock-fighting.2

All these sports lent themselves to gambling, which seems to have been quite heavy, and cards was also a popular way of losing money and stolen goods. Reivers commonly wagered their spoils; for example, William Taylor of Hethersgill, an Englishman who rode forays with the Armstrongs, “had fower nowte (cattle) about his house, stolen from Chalke, and plaied one of them away at cards”. At the other end of the social scale King James IV of Scotland, visiting Dumfries in 1504, played cards against the English Warden, Lord Dacre, who took him for £2 6s 8d. Border papers and letters contain many references to cards, but dice is less frequently mentioned.

The more sophisticated entertainments were rare. London might be enjoying a theatrical boom late in Elizabeth’s reign, but when a troupe of actors crossed the Border in 1599 it was such a phenomenon that John Carey wrote to Cecil about it: the Kirk had forbidden them to appear in Scotland, he reported, “and have preached against them with very vehement reprehensions”. But to the great offence of the Church, King James VI, who was a theatre enthusiast, commanded that the players should perform and that no one should be prevented from seeing them.

But such entertainments, if they had ever reached the Borderland, would have seemed tame to people whose pastime it was to fashion their drama from their own lives. “They take great pleasure in their own music”, wrote Leslie, “and in their rhythmical songs, which they compose upon the exploits of their own ancestors.” When James IV came to the Borders, with a large following of minstrels and musicians, he also spent sums on local performers, who included a girl from Carlisle specially engaged to sing for him. Her fee was 28s. But although they might hold their own in music, it was in poetry that the Borderers excelled.

The Border ballads are world famous. They are earth poetry. That they have survived in such quantity is due largely to the industry and enthusiasm of Sir Walter Scott, who saved them from oblivion. He and others added ballads of their own, but both the original folk-poems and the imitations are in a literary class by themselves. It seems strange that such a crude, warlike folk should produce such a vital and lasting literature. Scott believed that the wilder the society the more violent the impulse received from poetry and music; the impulse in the Border was both violent and permanent.